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Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’S Building

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Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’S Building FEMINIST ART EDUCATION AT THE LOS ANGELES WOMAN’S BUILDING Betty Ann Brown “The women’s art movement of Southern California undertook the creation of feminist education as a high priority . The emphasis on ed ucation distinguishes the West Coast women’s art movement from that in New York, for example, which focuses more on the needs of professional women artists to advance their careers . ” –Faith Wildin g 1 Feminism is one of the great movements for human liberation. The “second wave” of feminism in the United States began in the sixties alongside the Civil Rights Movement and other broad-based initiatives that challenged the authority of the dominant cul - ture. Much of the political action of the decade was sited on university campuses, and the decade changed the face of the academy. (I remember participating in a 1968 sit-in at my college president’s office to compel him to institute a Black Studies Program.) In line with the call for egalitarianism (including race, class, and gender), adult education and community re-education were also carried out in community institutions throughout the country. Feminist educators were among the leaders of liberatory edu - cation, and feminist artists and historians were prominent among them. The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop were among the van - guard in feminist art education. Cheryl Swannack spray painting ceiling, construction 141 of the new space on Spring Street , 1975. Woman’s Building Image Archive, Otis College of Art and Design. From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture Brown Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building The first Women’s Studies course was offered in the United States in 1966. 2 California” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. People crowded around Within seven years, there were more than two thousand Women’s Studies classes the videotapes of Chicago’s early work, and some of the viewers’ comments were truly taught at various U.S. institutions. 3 By 1970, art historian Linda Nochlin was offering vitriolic. It was the only site in the immense and varied exhibition that brought forth courses on women in the arts in New York. 4 That same year, artist Judy Chicago organ - such viewer hostility.) ized the Feminist Art Program (FAP) at California State University, Fresno. 5 It was the According to Chicago, the “most powerful work” of the year in Fresno was the first program of its kind. 6 performance art work. 14 This led her to conclude that one reason so few women In her autobiography, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist , excelled in traditional art educational contexts is that the curricula focused on histori - Chicago recalled that she and the (male) department chair at Fresno discussed that cally valued media—primarily painting and sculpture—which were precisely the media while many young women took art classes, few became professional artists. 7 Chicago that men dominated. It is important to note that in 1974, almost two-thirds of students decided to offer an all-woman class. Using her own experience as a model, she focused trained in art and art history in the United States were women, but only 2 1% of the fac - on “the struggle out of role conditioning that a woman would have to make if she ulty members were female. 15 When I joined the faculty of the art department of Cali- were to realize herself.” 8 Chicago had the class meet off campus because she had fornia State University, Northridge, in 1975, there was only one full-time art studio “ample demonstrations” of how intimidated many young women are in the presence of professor who was female. Even in 1999, when we hired two women as studio faculty men . [the male] presence reminded the women of society’s tacit and all-pervasive members, several of the men questioned the women’s technical competence. One man instruction that they should not be too aggressive, so that the men’s egos would not be went so far as to suggest that we needed to bring in a male mentor for one of the new threatened. ”9 She told the women that the first step was to locate and prepare a studio female faculty members because she probably could not handle the classes on her own. for the class meetings. As the students were compelled to develop practical skills in Such a suggestion was never made for new male hires. However, with the rise of artistic construction and the use of power tools, their physical self-confidence grew. pluralism in the late seventies and the emergence of new media like performance, video During the first class meetings, Chicago and the students began what the artist and installation, women artists began to find their creative voices in visual languages referred to as “a kind of modified consciousness-raising, which combined the ex- previously unheard by the art establishment. Today, women continue to be the majority pressing of common experiences with . trying to help the women understand the in art classes and the minority on studio faculties, but the ratios are changing. Chicago implications of those experiences in order to change their behavior patterns.” 10 summarized the success of her early efforts in Fresno: Chicago believed that consciousness-raising could “revolutionize teaching . because [as] one goes ‘around the circle,’ one discovers that the strangest people know the Once I had organized the class, taken it away from the school, given ‘right’ answer.” 11 myself and the students a space of our own and a support group, pro - In the second semester of the Fresno Program, Chicago added a research vided them with a positive role model and an environment in which component to the class. The students began to investigate women artists of the past, in we could be ourselves, growth for all of us was inevitable . This sug - order to rediscover their “hidden heritage,” and they started an archive. The archive gests that what I stumbled on in Fresno has implications for all areas grew into the first West Coast file on women artists’ work .12 of female education. 16 Chicago encouraged the students to make art out of their personal experi - ences, rather than solely out of formal issues—form, line, texture and colo r—that had Indeed it does. little to do with their daily lives. They began to create art about shared female experi - ences—for example, the sensation of having their personal space violated by a man. It was like being at the moment of birth, the birth of a new kind of Chicago recalled that the students began “showing images of feelings and experiences community of women, a new kind of art made by women. 17 that none of us had ever seen portrayed before; paintings and drawings, poems, per - formances, and ideas for films, all revealing the way women saw men . The images Chicago invited Miriam Schapiro, a well-known New York painter, to speak at Fresno. that day came out with an incredible force, as if they had been bottled up and sud- Excited by the program Chicago had established, Schapiro convinced her husband, denly released. They were so powerful that they frightened me. ”13 (Early feminist art Paul Brach, who was then dean at California Institute of the Arts (Ca lArt s), to institute images remain powerful; they continue to frighten. Perhaps that is why they elicit such a similar structure there, where Chicago and Schapiro could teach together. In fall 1971, heated responses from so much of the public. In January 2001, I toured the “Made in Chicago and her new collaborator moved the Fresno Program to Ca lArts , which is 142 143 From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture Brown Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building located in Valencia just north of Los Angeles. 18 Several of the Fresno students decided to continue their art education at CalArts. Together with their teachers, they founded the Feminist Art Program ( FAP), endeavoring “to establish an alternative context in which one did not have to choose between ‘being a woman and being an artist.’ ”19 Chicago, Schapiro, and the Ca lArts students also organized the First West Coast Con- ference of Women Artists, which took place from January 21 to 23, 1972. 20 In order to learn about the history of feminist art education, I augmented my library research with telephone interviews of several of the women involved. I spoke with Los Angeles artists Cheri Gaulke, Robin Mitchell, and Linda Vallejo in November and December 2000. Information from the interviews appears below and throughout this essay. In early 1971, while she was an art student in Southern California, Robin Mitchell heard a radio interview with Judy Chicago. Robin’s art education experience up to that point had been overwhelming dom - inated by male teachers. She remembers one professor commenting, “I don’t really like teaching girls; they just grow up and get married. So I’m going to teach the guys. I hope you don’t mind.” Another blithely said, “Art schools are the hunting grounds for mistresses Judy Chicago: A Survey of Four Decades of Art Making , National Museum of Women in the Arts, and second wives.” And Robin still has a photograph that one of her Washington, D.C., 2002. Installation view. Photograph by Donald Woodman. © Donald Woodman. fellow students took of the all-male faculty. An image of eight beard - ed men similarly attired in denim shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots, the photo is titled, “How to become an artist by imitating your teacher.” was to line every surface in the room with quilted fabric, but she soon realized that hers was an overly ambitious plan: she simply didn’t have When Robin heard Judy Chicago talking about the Fresno Program, the time.
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